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The Grit and Glamour of Queer LA Subculture

ReachLA Visit

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Queer of Color Archiving Here we consider what "queer of color archiving" might look like for the house/ball scene in the context of its living repertoires and mainstream moving image representations like Paris is Burning and Pose. In addition to being mindful of Taylor's concern that archives have at best a remote relationship to performance-based cultures, we are also mindful of the fact that REACH LA is not equivalent to the LA house/ball scene. The spectacle of the ballroom is one of a number of vehicles for REACH's larger material mission of fostering self-care for LGBT* youth of color. An active non-profit struggling for funding and mostly committed to arts-programming and HIV-prevention might not frame archiving as a priority, even as such organizations hold crucial collections. While Occidental College can help initiate the process of organizing a multimedia history of REACH from these collections, undergraduates and professors at liberal arts colleges cannot do the work of professional archivists.

We hope that our partial display of REACH's collections might inspire a broader archival mission, but we also want our provisional Scalar exhibits and scholarly approach to clarify the stakes of documenting house/ball and arts-based HIV prevention. To this end, we think that it is worth spending some time with both "queer of color critique" and the archival (re)turn in recent queer studies.
We have lingered with Paris is Burning in part because an early strain of queer of color critique treated the film as a kind of "bad object" over and around which to articulate its own materialist approach to situated knowledge production. Indeed, Muñoz’s field-founding 1999 text, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, pointedly pivots toward the documentary The Salt Mines (1990) with its “starker and less glamorous” rendering of black and Latinx trans life in New York as an “antidote” to the sensational ethos of Paris.[1] Roderick Ferguson's 2004 Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique assiduously avoids direct mention of Paris but hails Chandan Reddy's essay about the film and glosses a brief image of a "black drag-queen prostitute" from Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied (1989), a film about black queer life released a year earlier than Paris. Ferguson argues that because this black trans sex worker is a "fixture of urban capitalism," who manifests as both hypervisible and unaccountable as a site of critical affirmation, queer of color critique must "disidentify with historical materialism" -- i.e. disclaim Marxism's historical inability to read the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality while also retooling its crucial methods.[2] Even Nyong’o, who defends Paris and lauds the Houses United ball, concludes that “Vogueing and walking on the Celebrate Brooklyn stage -- welcome as it was --does nothing to transform the real conditions of poverty, racism, and transphobia,” which continue to plague members of the ballroom scene.[3]

In other words, the stakes are larger than good or bad representations for queer of color critics. As performance studies scholars, Nyong’o and Muñoz are hardly dismissing spectacle outright in favor of deterministic historical materialism; rather, they argue that queer of color critique dialectically measures the real conditions of the past and present with fantasy worlds that make for livable lives. Whereas queer theory has traditionally staked its claim in polemical critiques of normativity, queer of color analysis, according to scholar Amy Villarejo, “takes the prismatic pressures of the normative as impossible to seize and to systematize simultaneously.”[4] This chapter of The Grit and Glamour of Queer LA seeks to positively channel some of this impossibility of simultaneous seizure and systemization that Villarejo locates in queer of color critique. In our following "Archive" section, we certainly try to seize part of REACH’s collections. Yet we also attempt to respect the LA ball scene’s own systemization by displaying its repertoire through ephemera and by linking ball programs to video of actual performances so they may speak for themselves.

That said, recent interest in "queering the archive" has pushed us to reconsider how archival practice comes with its own deep history of critique about appropriation. In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Derrida interrogates the etymology of the concept of “archive,” linking it to ancient Greek terms signifying “the residence of the magistrates” or “those who commanded.” The act of archiving thus connotes a disciplining by “coordinating a diverse assemblage of [materials] to articulate an ideal unity.”[5] To "queer" ostensibly means anything but such an ordering of things, identities, and periods. Queer histories have certainly been lost and silenced, but as Michel Foucault argues, LGBT* politics forestall a richer history of "bodies and pleasures" when it insist on an epochal historiography of ever mounting visibility.[6] Even when evidence of LGBT* lives presents itself clearly, “Queer things cannot have straight histories,” as the editors of recent special issues of the Radical History Review dedicated to “queering archives” succinctly state.[7] Queer archiving can thus seem both an urgent and impossible task. On the one hand, queer of color archiving can seem only to complicate such a task further; on the other hand, the point of reading intersectionally is not necessarily (just) to increase inclusion in mainstream activities like institutional archiving, but rather to unsettle the terms of engagement and to look differently.

As Kwame Holmes notes in “What’s the Tea,” queer communities, and especially racial minority ones, may archive their histories in more informal modes such as gossip (“tea”) and ephemera that are often illegible to an outsider.[8] Can there be such a thing as an archive of gossip, and/or should gossip itself be considered a community archival practice? While Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and José Esteban Muñoz had previously raised these issues in the context of literary and performance studies, Holmes gets at the material and affective sine wave unique to the historian’s disappointment that a certain oral history respondent might refuse to “spill the tea” one day and delight at finding a gossip column in a 1980s black queer newspaper another day.[9] We are also inspired by ethnographer Martin K. Manalansan IV, who examines the lives of undocumented immigrants and their household archives of “stuff.” While potentially just as opaque as Holmes’s gossip is to outsiders, the “mess and migration” of queer immigrant lives for Manalansan actually reveals an auto-archival practice through “seemingly hoarder-like household material, symbolic, and emotional conditions [that] are arenas for creation of a queer immigrant archive that enables contestations of citizenship, hygiene, and social order.”[10] Through choreographies charting the rhythm of shared space, his respondents, “the Queer Six,” produce a cramped but curated household, a kind of queer kinship, and an archive of blended humans and things. Where Manalansan first observes an apartment that “was like a haggard old person, weighted down by the burdens of things and lives,” he excavates a hot mess, in the best sense of the term.[11]

If queer of color archiving provides an exciting hermeneutic, it is because it offers that everything provisionally means and matters in under-documented marginalized lives and that new principles of command and coordination may be afoot. It also means admitting certain limits and opacities into the archive itself. As Leah De Vun and Michael J. McClure suggest in their piece “Archives Behaving Badly,” we attempt to fashion our Scalar archive “as a site where the ellipses and limits of the past might become accretive and communal sites for the present.”[12] It also suggests deeper interdisciplinary engagements that exploit and repurpose traditional methodologies to value what might otherwise seem disposable. In our case, when Oxy students merely observed a huge stack of unused and out-of-date condoms at the REACH LA headquarter, we wondered how a professional archivist might throw them out whereas a museum curator might display them against a wall as evidence of REACH's enduring efforts. Why has REACH LA kept this pile of condoms? This question seemed to open on a much larger narrative about a busy non-profit that has accidentally accreted an incredible collection. Time and care equally but differently animate the task of the community organization, the archivist, and the archival researcher.

We hope that our readers experience the palimpsestic pleasures that this digital archive may provide and get a sense of our own thrill in getting to sift through REACH's remarkable collection. Our experiences of viewing grainy SuperBeta sex-ed videos (meant to be screened for Club Prophylactive), listening to Adrienne Adams’ audio recordings of the organization’s histories and gossip, and watching the “Legendary” Sean Milan showing off his moves on video certainly provoked our own archival passions. By layering 25 years of lived queer of color experience mediated through a non-profit organization and its collections, we attempt to work against the idea of archiving as a disciplinary, unifying discourse. While we remain outsiders to the house/ball subculture’s grit and glamour, our field visit and Scalar’s multimedia capacities have allowed us to experience a sense of its grain, both in terms of its lasting groove in cultural history and the material status of its various documentary media. In the next section Adrienne Adams speaks of what it meant to dig deeper after the CTSJ 337 course ended.
Documentary/Archive/Repertoire How dated are these concerns of intersectional minority appropriation? With regard to the actual film, the answer is, apparently, not at all, as evidenced by the controversy surrounding the twenty-fifth anniversary screening of Paris at the “Celebrate Brooklyn” LGBT* Pride event in 2015. Initially, no one from the house/ball scene was consulted or invited. An ensuing internet storm lead to cancelations of performers, re-adjudication of Livingston’s initial appropriation, and an eventual attempt to make amends with a staging of a House United ball.[1] In a Bully Bloggers posting called "After the Ball," Tavia Nyong’o argues that this incident demonstrates how paradoxical attitudes toward queer of color life persist. On the one hand, the house members were once again sidelined, their legends presumed to be dead, and their actual thriving community relegated to a kind of social death by nostalgic embrace of the film’s anniversary. On the other hand, the rectification of throwing the House United ball in conjunction with the screening called for a command performance that Nyong’o links to José Muñoz’s idea of a particular queer of color “burden of liveness,” which Nyong’o defines as the condition where “queers of color are expected to perform liveness and vitality under conditions of temporary visibility that erase our histories and futures.”[2]

If many of the concerns that vexed Paris is Burning’s initial reception still haunt actual queer of color lives, the status of the film has changed through the sheer force of time. Nyong’o writes that “rather than standing in for ball culture – an unfair expectation of any single film, no matter how amazing — the film could be understood as part of queer history, and specifically part of the ball culture’s history, and even part of its futurity as well.”[3] More productive than making a metonymic critique of the film’s failures to represent the multiple facets of ballroom culture (a culture that is, in its very nature, multifaceted and elusive), Nyong’o highlights the ability of the film to showcase the authenticity and contradiction that are inherent to ballroom culture. While there are certainly complex, and even problematic elements at play with Paris is Burning, the film cannot be disregarded for the simple fact of the overall awareness it raised about the black queer demographic that makes up the ballroom community. The film is spectacle, but so is the art form it showcases.

The legacy of Paris is Burning in the academic discourse and popular culture reminds us that the medium is not, in fact, always equivalent to the message. Nyong’o points out that the historical position of the film, and the critiques that followed it, contrasts with today’s born-digital age. The increased proliferation of smart phone produced media, viral videos, and “webcams and reality TV” have resulted in an increased tactic of “broadcasting our daily lives in a potential revenue stream, if only we make that life interesting/outrageous/abject enough.”[4] Where Harper and others once focused on the material condition of the ball-goers lives and Livingston’s means of production, Nyong’o notes that a culture of ego-casting fueled by new media not only disrupts the documentarian and subject divide but also renders “performance […] almost a default setting for everyone.” As Nyong'o points out, "Octavia St. Laurent’s and Venus Xtravaganza’s expectations of celebrity, that once seemed tinged with pathos, now seem like viable career ambitions. Dorian Corey’s world-wise wisdom about the illusions of fame seem to come from a vanished queer world now lost in the glare of mass media visibility."

Questions of cultural appropriation have recently been renewed, as evidenced by the controversy over Miley Cyrus’s foray into the African American dance style “twerking” at the 2013 MTV Music Video Awards. Yet these age-old issues of racial appropriation that Eric Lott famously framed as an ambivalent interracial relation of “love and theft” significantly change with technological advances.[5] It is ironic that the same summer of the Brooklyn Pride debacle saw the debut of Tangerine (2015), a day-in-the-life narrative feature about black trans sex workers, based largely on the experiences of its main amateur actresses.[6] One wonders whether this movie was not similarly accused of cultural appropriation because audiences and critics were distracted by the fact that its white cis-male director, Sean Bake,r shot it entirely on an iPhone for one-fifth of Livingston’s budget. The mashup of heightened technophilia and social-justice enthusiasm for the “trans tipping point” of the last few years may account for Tangerine’s free pass, but we would note that the burden of queer of color “liveness” is still at play with this movie. Tangerine’s trailer shows how the grit and grain of the cell phone format recovers some glamour by “goin’ hard” with performance and soundtrack.

Yet Nyong’o also states that “Vogueing and walking on the Celebrate Brooklyn stage – welcome as it was --does nothing to transform the real conditions of poverty, racism, and transphobia,” which continue to plague members of the ballroom scene.[7] Paris is Burning arguably catalyzed not just queer theory but the materialist articulations of what is now recognized as “queer of color critique.” Indeed, Muñoz’s foundational text Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics pointedly pivots toward the documentary The Salt Mines (1990) with its “starker and less glamorous” rendering of black and Latinx trans life in New York as an “antidote” to the sensational ethos of Paris.[8] As performance studies scholars, Nyong’o and Muñoz are hardly dismissing spectacle outright in favor of deterministic historical materialism; rather, they argue that queer of color critique dialectically measures the real conditions of the past and present with fantasy worlds that make for livable lives. Nyong'o suggests that the new materiality of digitally mediated lives will affect not just fleshly embodiments but emergent methodologies of critique.

We are reminded here of Diana Taylor’s foundational performance studies work on the distinction between the archive and the repertoire. “As opposed to the supposedly stable objects in the archive, the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same. The repertoire both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning.”[9] While resisting any simplistic dichotomy, Taylor notes that the archive/repertoire distinction tends to align with a colonizer/colonized division. Documentary craft like Livingston’s purport to preserve the repertoire of the ball for a lasting queer archive. Yet even these divisions dissolve in the context of an organization like REACH LA, which hosts balls; teaches dance, vogue, and walking classes; provides material services for HIV prevention, and has inadvertently accumulated a rich archive. Taylor issues a pessimistic view of how the digital era will be effected by the embodied knowledge system of the repertoire: “Now, on the brink of the digital revolution that both utilizes and threatens to displace writing, the body again seems poised to disappear in a virtual space that eludes embodiment.”[10] We, by contrast think that the analog and digital collaborations embodied by the world of REACH suggest new choreographies of meaning.

Upon our initial release of Grit and Glamour's ongoing project, the FX scripted show Pose (2018-) produced by television's white gay cis-male enfante terrible Ryan Murphy, has premiered and is now bingeable for those who have access to . Many of the "authors" of the "trans tipping point" -- Janet Mock (Marie Claire), Silas Howard (Transparent), and Our Lady J. (Transparent) -- are authors of this venture. But so are the actresses and producers, many of whom come directly from the New York house/ball scene and have no training as Hollywood actors, writers, or producers. Will Pose register as cultural appropriation or the end of the very concept? Murphy respects the "old ways," invents new categories, and is hailed as the Mother of the House of Murphy, having taken over Steven Canals's idea for a scripted show about the house/ball sceneplay, originally presented by Livingston, who was initially consulted and eventually taken on as a producer. [fn]

Pose goes through it's L-Word moment of seemingly necessary aesthetic shame for the better good of social justice, indulging as it does in an after-school special tone that, in the end, works as it gets more serious about HIV, homelessness, and illegal work. The children in the houses need to know about HIV/AIDS. Safe sex matters. This show is about the dangers of sex and gender desire, and it is about how and why people take risks to be and become, in knowledge and in spite of knowledge. To want to become, to want to have sex without fear, to live at all in a world that wants you to just die and go away becomes the lietmotif of Pose. But so does the idea that getting a trophy at a ball is like getting a promotion at Trump Tower, a building and a man, pointedly set off-stage in this devastating yet clunky narrative about New York City in the 1980s, with its crime, crack, multi-various sex trades, neoliberal financial test-cases, post-punk/no-wave aesthetics, and hip-hop origins, and a hot-mess that no one can either deny or embrace. Does the fact that Pose is a scripted, long-form, drama solve for the complaints about Paris is Burning or make the question of cultural appropriation hotter?

[1] Tavia Nyong’o, “After the Ball,” https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2015/07/08/after-the-ball/.
[2] Nyong'o, "After the Ball."
[3] Nyong'o, "After the Ball."
[4] Nyong'o, "After the Ball."
[5] Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[6] This information comes from an interview with actress Mya Taylor at Occidental College, March 16, 2017. When asked about Tangerine’s cultural appropriation and the legacy of Paris is Burning, she refused the terms of engagement with campy consternation.
[7] Nyong'o, "After the Ball"
[8] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 162. For more on the queer of color critique and historical materialism, see Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
[9]
[10] Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 20.
[11] Taylor, Archive and Repetoire, 16.
[12] Amy Villarejo, “Tarrying With the Normative: Queer Theory and Black History,” Social Text Vol.23, Nos.3&4 (Fall/Winter 2005): 69-84, 70.
[13] Jesse Green, “Paris has Burned,” New York Times, April 8, 1993.
[14] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Ovah